Background

Ruth Janet Parker was born on August 23, 1913 in Adams Center, New York. She was the sixth child of Carlton and Jennie (Spencer) Parker. Two events occurred that were to shape Ruth’s life permanently and profoundly. One happened just prior to her birth, and one not long after. In January and March 1912, Ruth’s aunt and uncle Isabelle (Adams) and Eber Spencer both died of influenza, leaving a family of five young children. Various relatives offered to take in one or two of the children, until Jennie and her husband Carlton stepped in and agreed to take in the orphans of her deceased younger brother and his wife in order to keep them together. Jennie and Carl’s own children were eighteen-year-old Percy, fifteen-year-old Harold, nine-year-old Grace, and nearly six-year-old twins Glenn and Lynn. Ruth’s birth occurred the following year. When they came to live with their aunt, uncle, and cousins, the Spencer children were nine-year-old Edna, eight-year-old Lydia, five-year-old Howard, three-year-old Kent, and six-month-old Eva. They grew up calling Jennie “Aunt Jen.” The blended family took up residence on the Massey Street Road farm where the Parkers lived.

In June 1915, despondent over his poor health and a recent fire that had destroyed the family’s home, Carlton Parker committed suicide by drinking a poison called “Paris green,” commonly used as an insecticide and dye. So Ruth was left with no father, and at just twenty-two months of age, no memory of him. Her mother, Jennie, remarried in 1921, to William Henry Sedgemore, a native of Devonshire, England, who had emigrated to Jefferson County in 1914. Bill worked as a farmhand and was also employed as a crewman on Great Lakes cargo vessels, which would take him away from home for months at a time. Ruth and her siblings always referred to him as Bill, and Ruth’s children and nieces and nephews called him “Uncle Bill.”

Jennie and Bill Sedgemore adopted two children in the late 1920s—June, born in 1927, and Bill, Jr., born in 1928. Teenagers Ruth and Eva delighted in the opportunity to help care for younger siblings. The family was close and many of the children remained in the area after they grew up, married, and had children of their own.

Through a family acquaintance, Grace and Lydia were given the opportunity to work during the summers at the Winter Clove House, a hotel in the Catskills. It was here that Lydia probably met her future husband Francis Sprague, a native of nearby Middleburg. Francis and his best friend, David Coffin, had spent time working for the Civilian Conservation Corps in 1933, and had recently returned home looking for work. Meanwhile, Ruth had graduated from high school and then traveled to Albany where she began training at the National Training School for Certified Nurses.

It was through Lydia and Francis that Ruth met David Coffin. What follows is their correspondence beginning in December 1934 and ending in November 1936.

-Lisa Walsh Dougherty